A Pair Programming Article…in the New York Times?!

It’s one thing to see an article on pair programming in a a book, magazine or site that concerns itself with software development, but it’s something completely different when you see it covered in the New York Times. Still, that’s exactly the topic of an article in the Sunday, September 20th edition titled For Writing Software, a Buddy System. In it, developer and Rubyist Jim Remsik, who works at Hashrocket, does a pretty good job of explaining pair programming to an audience that is presumably most non-developers. I might have to use his Where’s Waldo example the next time I need to describe the benefits of pair programming.

A little aside: Hashrocket’s logo is a great example of a development company working closely with a design company. After some discussion about the company’s name and where it comes from, they took the => symbol, which demarcates the keys from the values in Ruby hashes, and worked it into a clever little graphic. This is what good designers do, especially when you communicate with them!